Podcasts about happy ending music

Amanda Stern is the author of The Long Haul and eleven books for children written under the pseudonyms AJ Stern and Fiona Rosenbloom. In 2003, she founded the legendary Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, which required creative artists to take risks on stage. The multi-disciplinary series became the gold standard for literary events; many of today's series are (knowingly and unknowingly) based on Happy Ending's model. It was produced at Joe's Pub and later at Symphony Space. The series ended in 2018. Her most recent book is Little Panic, a memoir about growing up with an undiagnosed panic disorder in Etan Patz era Greenwich Village is out now from Grand Central Publishing. Amanda is a mental health advocate, speaker, and advisory board member for Bring Change to Mind. As a writer, she's required to live in Brooklyn, which she does, with her daughter Busy, who also happens to be a dog.Support the show

Amanda Stern is the author of Little Panic, a memoir about growing up in 80's New York with undiagnosed panic disorder. She also wrote The Long Haul, and eleven books for children. She's an advisory board member of the non-profit The Child Mind Institute. The founder of New York City's iconic Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, widely considered the gold standard for literary events, Amanda currently hosts an outstanding podcast about books and authors called Bookable. She lives in Brooklyn with Busy, the cutest possible canine sidekick.Find more information on:Little PanicChild Mind InstituteBookable podcast

This is the book podcast everyone's talking about. Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York's famous Joe's Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a great book—usually a new one, sometimes classic or even obscure, but always one hundred percent worth knowing about.

Amanda Stern is the author of the novel The Long Haul, the memoir Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life, and eleven children's books written under pseudonyms. She founded the popular Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in 2003, which had its final show at Joe's Pub in June 2018. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter Busy, who just happens to be a dog.

Brad Listi talks with Amanda Stern, author of the memoir LITTLE PANIC: DISPATCHES FROM AN ANXIOUS LIFE (Grand Central Publishing). Stern's first novel "The Long Haul" (Soft Skull Press) was published in 2003. That same year, she launched The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, producing over 250 shows and welcoming over 700 creative artists, ranging from Lena Dunham to Laurie Anderson, before ending the series in 2016. She has also published nine children's books. She lives in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week’s episode features an in-depth conversation with writer Amanda Stern. We discuss her incredible new book LITTLE PANIC: DISPATCHES FROM AN ANXIOUS LIFE, how she deals with her lifelong anxiety, her connection to Etan Patz, and the absolute horror of separating children from their parents. Amanda Stern was born in New York City and raised in Greenwich Village. She’s the author of The Long Haul and eleven books for children written under the pseudonyms Fiona Rosenbloom and AJ Stern. In 2003, she founded the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, a long-running and beloved event that became an essential part of the New York City literary landscape. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Busy. She is the author of the brand new book Little Panic: Dispatches From an Anxious Life, which is now available wherever books are sold. To grab the audiobook for free (and a 30-day free trial of the Audible service), head over to www.anxietydiariespodcast.com/audible! You can find her at www.amandastern.com and follow her on Twitter @amandastern and Instagram @alittlestern and @littlepanicbook. You can also find her on Facebook right here. You can follow Busy on Instagram @busyinbk. If you want to send Amanda your worries, you can do so at littlepanic@amandastern.com Here is a link to Amanda’s Facebook post that we discuss in the episode. You can find her Anxiety Resources here and her brother’s creation The Breathing App right here. Full show notes can be found at: www.anxietydiariespodcast.com/17 Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the podcast, please make sure you subscribe and take a moment to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts! You can find the podcast at www.anxietydiariespodcast.com or at imsoanxious.com, on Facebook and Instagram @anxietydiariespodcast and on Twitter @anxietydiarypod.

Host and curator Amanda Stern concluded this season’s Happy Ending Music & Reading series at Joe’s Pub on July 11 with an evening themed around “communication.”  Stern’s themes are almost always designed to resonate ironically and this program was no exception, as the authors Rajesh Parameswaran, Alex Shakar and Nell Freudenberger delivered variations on the idea of wanting what you can’t have, and don't know how to ask for. Parameswaran read from his collection “I am an Executioner” — a story in which a captive tiger falls in love with his zookeeper and things do not go well. Shakar offered an excerpt from his novel “Luminarium.”  His protagonist Fred is beset by a Job-like pile of woes, and spends an afternoon with a Hollywood wannabe who claims to have achieved enlightenment.  Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Newlyweds” features a 21st-century version of the mail-order bride; in the excerpt heard here, she finds her arranged (by her) wedding more light-hearted than she anticipated. Musical guest Ana Egge helped set the mood with a set of dark rock/folk songs about — well, wanting what you can’t have. This show was the last at Joe’s Pub.  The series will continue in the autumn. For further information check Stern’s website at http://amandastern.com/happy-ending/ To hear excerpts from the readings, and Egge’s performance, click on the player above. Bons Mots A tiger in love.  “Where was my hunger?  Where was all the gloom and trouble of the day?  It was all gone.  Kitch was here.” -- Rajesh Parameswaran, “The Infamous Bengal Ming.” Unlikely prophet at a Universal theme park.  “’So I heard you attained Nirvana or something,’ Fred mumbled…’what’s that mean?’…’beyond the slum of human reality. It means free, Freddie, just free.’”—Alex Shakar, “Luminarium.” Wanting it the way she wants it.  “In ‘Desh you make your plans and they usually do not succeed.  But in America you make your plans and then they happen.”— Nell Freudenberger, “The Newlyweds.” 

The theme for the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub in March was Strange Places. Listen to the extraordinary — and absurd — environments that authors Jessica Anthony, Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavitz conjured up their readings. Host and curator Amanda Stern was fighting through a migraine. Author Jessica Anthony had a chest cold. And half of the musical duo Kaiser Cartel, Courtney Kaiser, went into labor the day of the show, leaving Benjamin Cartel to perform on his own. Regardless of these challenges, Anthony, along with the two authors Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavits, were in the house, reading from their work as well as performing their one-thing-they'd-never-performed-on-stage-before for the audience, which is one of Stern's requirements for participating in the series. Gray, an author who funded her current book tour via the popular web site Kickstarter, read a story about a date gone horribly, viscerally, wrong: larynxes fall out of the daters' throats, arms land on the floor and "flesh is siphoned into a free standing grandfather clock" that's set on fire and rolled into the street. After her reading, Gray arm-wrestled her editor on stage. Anthony read from her first novel, "The Convalescent," about "a short, sickly Hungarian near-midget who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia." Afterwards, she taught the crowd how to use sign language to perform a popular pop tune. Julavits, author and the co-editor of The Believer magazine, read what she calls "The Bachelor fan-fiction" — an imagined life of one of the bachelors who was kicked off of the show. She then performed rowdy rugby fight songs. Bon Mots: Happy Ending Music and Reading series host and curator Amanda Stern on headaches and humanity: "We are human beings. We grow people in our bodies. That's so weird. That's bizarre. So I think we actually live in the strangest place of all — where your head actually hurts. And you can't see what's causing it to hurt!" Amelia Gray reads the inconspicuous opening of a very conspicuous story: "The woman and man are on a date! It is a date! The woman rubs a lipstick print off her water glass. The man turns his butter knife over and over and over and over. Everyone has to pee. What's the deal with dates?!" Heidi Julavitz's Bachelor on how "so real" his connection to the bachelorette was: "When we were on our date on a half-finished skyscraper, which we summited with the help of a team of urban mountaineers, I said, 'This feels so real.' And Ashley had totally agreed."

The Happy Ending Music and Reading series has formed a partnership with the arts colony Yaddo located in Saratoga Springs, New York, to present programs featuring writers who have been Yaddo fellows. On December 7th, curator Amanda Stern welcomed three Yaddo alums at the series’ performance home, Joe’s Pub, for a program entitled “Reality and Scandal.”  Two of the authors, Helen Schulman and Jesse Browner, read from works featuring teenage boys in emotional, sexual and social turmoil — Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life" and Browner’s “Everything Happens Today.” This has been fruitful territory ever since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caufield made such a hash of his prep school career 60 years ago. The third writer, Walter Kirn, went engagingly off course with excerpts from his New York Magazine-approved (as in the weekly “Approval Ratings”) Bible blog. The writer inherited a well-worn study edition of the “King James Bible” from his mother, and is offering up hilariously transgressive interpretations of the narratives (example: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is about illicit drug use.)  Stern requires all her writers to “take a risk on stage,” and Kirn was eccentric here, too, inviting author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose memoir "Prozac Nation" he savaged in a 1994 review, to come up to the stage to enact her revenge. (She didn’t.) Musical guest Mark Eitzel was the perfect foil to the authors, offering up a trio of mordant songs about marginal and desperate characters. (You’ll hear an homage to a male stripper in the excerpt above).  Stern’s requirement for musical guests is that they play a cover song and try to get the audience to sing along. There was a kind of perverse pleasure, after an evening crowded with angst and tales of sexual misconduct, to hear Eitzel bring down the house (and carry every one of us with him) with that preposterously hopeful standard, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Bon Mots: Helen Schulman, author of “This Beautiful Life,” on the burden of allure: “’You are just an idiot boy,’ said Audrey…She slung that cool bag over her shoulder and she started walking. She started walking away from Jake and all the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future.” Jesse Browner, author of “Everything Happens Today," on coming of age: "If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes recognized, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence.” Novelist, critic and essay writer Walter Kirn on Genesis: "God basically made a huge mistake in creating man, and spends the first part of Genesis trying to correct himself."

The Happy Ending Music & Reading Series is celebrating a happy beginning. The series performance on June 8 at Joe’s Pub marked the launch of Happy Ending’s partnership with Yaddo, an artists’ working community based in Saratoga Springs, New York. Starting next fall, the series will produce three shows featuring entirely Yaddo-affiliated artists. Wednesday night, Suzanne Bocanegra and Kyle deCamp performed a collaborative visual and performance piece, and Amor Towles read from his new novel. Lucius, the musical guest and Happy Ending curator Amanda Stern’s self-proclaimed favorite band, took to the stage for two sets of tunes, gripping the audience with its haunting yet ethereal melodies. The band, fronted by Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, cast a spell over the crowd, traversing scales with a soulful clarity and an underlying pain that colored even the band's more upbeat numbers. As they performed, Wolfe and Laessig faced one another across a set of keyboards, dressed in matching mod apparel from their floral get-ups to their ponytail poufs to their hybrid heels (one blue, one pink for each leading lady). Toying with a similar mirror effect, the performing artist Bocanegra presented a piece entitled “How to Paint” in collaboration with the visual artist de Camp. Through vivid imagery of painting as a means of expression, Bocanegra brought to life de Camp’s own coming of age experiences. On the screen behind her played an accompanying video in which pieces of mounted artwork were continuously layered on top of one another. Towles, a first-time novelist, also graced the stage to read excerpts from his novel "Rules of Civility." Passages from the book’s first chapter chronicled the late-night, big-city plans of 25 year-old Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse roommate, Eve. As the two women explored New York City in the late hours of the last night of 1937, Towles took his readers from a jazz club out onto the curbs of the city, meeting characters steeped in thoughts of gin and gentlemen, wit and winter, hardship and hope. The theme of “community” weaved its way throughout the night, accompanying tales of love and loss, friends and family, art and angst. Lucius’ whimsical harmony and Bocanegra’s search for an artistic identity traveled from the stage, dissipating through the performance space and culling an even greater sense of collaboration between the artists and the audience. But with all happy beginnings must come a happy ending. As the series commences its relationship with Yaddo, it also wrapped up its time at Joe’s Pub, which will be closed for renovations until October. Stern noted that it would be her first stretch of unoccupied time in seven years. In the spirit of community, she invited the audience to join her in “catching up," joking with the audience: “I’m going to go see The Gates, which I’m so excited about... I have to go back to Canal Jeans, a shirt from Fiorucci.... And if I have time I’m just going to run over to CBGB and see a couple of shows.” Bon Mots Suzanne Bocanegra performing "How to Paint": "I would look at the paintings. These are tragic paintings — paintings of obvious flatness making great depth. They gave a lot, they gave nothing. Some days, I would get lost in them, feel with them, and they were painful. They moved me. And on other days they didn’t move me at all." Amor Towles reading from "Rules of Civility": "In New York, it becomes so easy to assume that the city's most alluring women have flown in from Paris or Milan. But they're just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter 'I' like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, rough-housing and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs." Click on the link above to hear excerpts from the evening.

Two is a famously bad age for toddlers, but it seems to be a prime number for a reading series marking a rite of passage—in this case, the celebration this past Wednesday of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series’ two-year anniversary at Joe’s Pub.  Host and curator Amanda Stern called the evening “Old Friends/New Friends” and invited as readers Nelly Reifler and A.M. Homes—her first two guests when she started the series at a Chinatown bar seven years ago. Both women read stories that might be called modern fables. Reifler’s “Formica Dinette” was written for the Web site Underwater New York, which collects writing and art inspired by the waterways around New York City (take that, James Cameron). In this darkly comic piece (the actual dinette is somewhere in the East River) the Formica company somehow joins with a survivalist family gearing up for the final battle, and kitchen redesign is linked to the rehabilitation of a possessed parent. A.M. Homes’ untitled piece, written for her friend, the English painter Rachel Whiteread, shares some characteristics with its protagonist, a shapeshifter who treats sick buildings. It is a protean, lyrical work in which the woman moves through her day adapting her body to each circumstance she encounters. And she’s given to randomly sprouting feathers, which I take to be a metaphor for writing itself—the sharp feathery thing that makes its way to the surface and lets the possessor take wing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham, who represented “New Friends” on the program, and whose work is often as lyrical and complex as a Beethoven sonata, seemed to be channeling Norman Mailer, who he later cited, in a passage from his new novel “By Nightfall.”  In a glimpse of the early courtship of the married couple whose story the novel tells, Pete Harris is dazzled by the opulent gentility of his girlfriend Rebecca’s Virginia home, and is equally titillated by tales of the sexual adventures of her sister. (Click on the link above to hear selections from the evening’s readings.) Happy Ending’s trademark (other than good literature read in good company) is host Stern’s insistence that her authors take a risk on stage. This trio met the challenge inventively. Reifler translated randomly selected passages of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into an imaginary language, Idiga. A.M. Homes courted four volunteers from the audience using “speed dating” techniques from various Internet sites. (Hint, ask outrageous questions designed to reveal your candidate’s personality: “Do you think of chocolate as part of the food triangle?”; “Do you have a flat side?”; If you were a stalker, would you be a good one?”).  Cunningham, whose novel “The Hours” drew on the life of Virginia Woolf, offered a five-minute (all right, eight minute) history of the novel, concluding that rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated, and quoting Mailer, who once told a panel audience, with characteristic brio, that “The novel will be at your funeral.” Listen to Cunningham’s own version of “Cliff’s Notes” here: The musical guests for the evening were Thomas Bartlett and Sam Amidon, who offered up an eclectic mix of folk tunes, original songs, and pop standards, distinguished by fragile vocals that almost seemed to morph into the accompanying instruments. Hear their first set here:     Bon Mots "Mother may be disoriented mentally and spatially. This is just one more reason we suggest timing Mother’s emergence with the kitchen re-do."—Nelly Reifler, “Formica Dinette”.  "She’s a navigator, a mover, a shifter. She’s flown as a gull over the ocean, she’s dived deep as a whale, she spent an afternoon as a jellyfish, floating, as an evergreen with the breeze tickling her skin…She’s in constant motion, trying to figure out what comes next."—Reader A.M. Homes "If you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you. All those little satisfactions, and no big dangerous ones."—Michael Cunningham, “By Nightfall.” "The novel is born as a sort of lower form of entertainment, not unlike 'Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.'”—Michael Cunningham’s history of the novel in five minutes.